


Vanishing Point

by lackingsoy



Category: Code Geass
Genre: :(, Canonical Child Abuse, Child Abandonment, Childhood Friends, Colonialism, Found Family, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Hostage Situation, Imperialism, Mental Instability, Pre-Canon, Trust Issues, based on the stage 0 light novel, i said. FOUND. FAMILY, people are mentally ill, the trauma that comes with being biocapital, there's a patricide somewhere in here, traumatized children re: fascist parents and world war and imperialism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-04
Updated: 2021-03-04
Packaged: 2021-03-17 20:54:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,724
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29598609
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lackingsoy/pseuds/lackingsoy
Summary: The novelty of this new world died swiftly. From its bright, hazy obscurities emerged themes he was familiar with. Nunnally kept him attentive, meticulous. The rest of the world kept him inside, out of the smothering heat, into the grief that could not leak.
Relationships: Kururugi Suzaku & Lelouch Lamperouge | Lelouch vi Britannia, Kururugi Suzaku/Lelouch Lamperouge | Lelouch vi Britannia, Nunnally vi Britannia & Lelouch Lamperouge | Lelouch vi Britannia, Nunnally vi Britannia & Lelouch Lamperouge | Lelouch vi Britannia & Kururugi Suzaku
Comments: 1
Kudos: 18





	Vanishing Point

**Author's Note:**

> ok this is not the most intellectual thing I've written but that's why I'm publishing this and not the ones currently marinating in my drafts <3 anyways have this dusty piece from 2019. for context genbu is a lousy coward and the anime failed to cover the extent of his bullshit

Noon baked the ground with tendrils of summer heat, stiff and forgotten in his feet that were laced into small black shoes, tied and re-tied on the plane. Lelouch shifted, trying to swallow down the hotness in his mouth. The nausea of a new country, bile reaching out of him like nervous hands for something familiar. He forced his palms against the ridges of Nunnally’s wheelchair grips, pristine and recent. He wanted very much to go home, to the safe halls of his mother’s Villa where this could not reach them. 

“Brother,” Nunnally murmured, face turning upward as if to see his. She reached for him. Lelouch took her hand without pause, gaze set ahead. He watched the old Kururugi watch them with distant calculation, pinned there in his tight face like a sickly shine, eyes dark beads of interest. A boy with a young scowl twisting his face stood by him. The other Kururugi, a barely mentioned son. 

"We welcome you," said so in English, practiced, a consideration made in full stride. Beside him, the boy clenched his already rigidly set shoulders. The metal stung, nearly blistering where Lelouch held onto Nunnally’s chair. 

Here we are, he wanted to spit, just to cut away without a care. Just to see semblances spent, guttered. You were no different from Him, that father who was no father at all. Nunnally tugged on his sleeve: a gentle pressure.

Lelouch swallowed down the nausea, a comfortless heat suffocating the line of his posture. "Thank you," Lelouch said with his back needle-stuck straight, Japanese brittle and stilted on his tongue. He tried to pin his eyes on Genbu, the old leaning and looming figure who wasn’t innocuous enough, but the sun glared sharply. He looked towards the boy instead: small fists reared, the anger shaded under dark hair. Foreigner. 

Lelouch could say nothing else but “thank you”. He stamped down on his own shame. His tongue felt heavy in his mouth, burdened with a language he could not pick apart. The boy's lips curled in contempt, as if to laugh.

It was an old body of a building, fastened to wooden legs that kept it from rotting completely in the undergrowth that had sprung from the humid air. A dilapidated piece of structure for a place to stay, with bitten bark for support beams and threadbare walls that let in sickly swaths of heat. After years of neglect, its recency and human’s touch had faded away, run over again and again by rain, left standing merely to digest its wounds. Trees fanned out in all directions, running over nearby land, sprawling roots reaching into the forest like slow hands, the base of Mt. Fuji fed with it. 

They were a clinical distance from the main household, held arm’s length away on Kururugi's land. 

They were also near the sea. If the cicadas were not as loud, and if the heat did not make the blood roar in his ears, Lelouch thought he could hear the sound of it, pulsing inland. He saw it from the grainy opening under their narrow eave, sometimes: a faded horizon of blue, chafing against sand and crumbled rock. The memory of it rose in him until it swelled, breaking out from him in sheets of sweat and waves of nausea when the noonday sun burned his skin and when Lelouch remembered, with the same mild aftershock, that he was locked into the safety of a foreign space. He became sick with it. 

(“Lelouch,” his mother said carefully. He shifted around the fluttering material to peek up at her, her and her face that he could not really see. The light was too bright, even when he squinted. Her fingers fixed themselves into his hair, unmoving. “I won’t be able to be with you like this. Not always.” A mild stroke across his scalp. “I can’t protect you from your duties any more than you can mine.” She hummed a resonant little sound that reached Lelouch and placated him some, before the light’s intensity paled and she began to pale with it. “Do you understand that much, child?” Lelouch tugged at her sleeve, slippery and silky, uncomprehending. 

“But Mother,” he started. His mother hushed him by sweeping him off the ground. 

“Whose a little prince?” She cooed. He was held up against the sky where he flailed with delight, everything else suddenly unimportant. His mother smiled up at him, a silhouette of a thing, and said--) 

Nunnally’s hands were clumsy and sweeping, large empty movements that slashed at the air. Blind and reckless and uncoordinated. What little they had smashed to the floor, scatter of papers and ruined messes of food and silverware. 

Lelouch found her on the floor, legs twisted into the blankets, sharp knees and scrunched toes and sweat-clad skin. Spasms wrecking along the short distance of her body. Her metal chair sat inert. Immovable. Gravity glued to her bones. 

Nunnally did not move when Lelouch kneeled down and untangled her legs from the blankets, when he rearranged her ankles so that the hard bones of them did not jut into her calves. When he finally laid down next to her limp form and took her hands and bent his forehead into them and hummed, slow and even. 

(--“But at least I have you now.”)

The novelty of this new world died swiftly. From its bright, hazy obscurities emerged themes he was familiar with. Nunnally kept him attentive, meticulous. The rest of the world kept him inside, out of the smothering heat, into the grief that could not leak. He watched the outside like it was the stranger, and he the stranded. He counted the days, marked crude lines into scraps of food wrappers with dirt-streaked rocks.

Another thing that grew old: Nunnally’s wheelchair, which began to creak and whine as she moved across unpolished floorboards of the place. The sounds shuddered into the halls they barely walked. When Lelouch was not immediately there, she managed to propel a few inches forward by herself. Her forehead would be strained with sweat. The exhausted screech of the wheels like her arms, shaking to the bones. As if she could force the uselessness of her legs back with her braced hands, cornered to the wheel’s hand rims, the chair’s armrests. Lelouch thought about how young she was to have her fingers rubbed raw with the effort to hold her own weight. Soon, the grips grew worn and Lelouch’s hands grew calloused. 

Nunnally took his hands and held them often; the two of them bent into each other at night, when the air didn’t grow intolerably hot between their hooked fingers. 

“When can we go back?” she whispered. Her eyes were always closed, but they pinched and moved, a wobble there close enough to tears. But she didn’t cry; neither of them did. Lelouch curled around her, a hand running past her forehead and smoothing down her short bangs, and said nothing. No sound came from the windows except for the distant rush of cicadas, angled and staggered with dissonance. 

Lelouch dreamed of home, a faraway thing driven across water, shimmering and untouchable and derelict. _Sine spe recuperandi_. A graveyard for deeply lost things, shadows of it like unopened eyes. He shook himself awake, throat clogged with dryness and an aborted call for his mother. The air moved across his face and neck and arms when he sat up, sticky with it. His thoughts burned with unrest. 

So this was the way of kings. So this was the miserable duty of the throne. The haze of black-red behind his eyelids like the carpeted stairs he could easily slip from, sliding the way down so that he could be found next to his mother and his sister. 

Nunnally gripped his hand as she slept, fitful and seizing. She was crying, mouth shaping sounds that he could not hear. Mother. Mother. Father. Lelouch did not fall back to sleep. 

Finally, when the sun finally rose and broke through the gaps between their wooden walls, he could not stay indoors any longer. He rummaged for his prized pouch of yen and briefly smiled to promise his dazed sister that he would be back with the oranges she liked. 

When he left for the markets, Lelouch did not take the path down by the sea. 

Suzaku was the boy’s name, Lelouch learned. Mostly because other boys sputtered his name and ran away soon after. 

He pulled himself up, head throbbing at where it was pressed into the gravel and broken asphalt for several long minutes. Lelouch saw his grocery bag a few feet away and tracked its spilled contents (two oranges, a carton of milk, some dried apricots). The carton had split open, milk flooding a nearby patch of grass, the thick white diluted brown and black with mud and dirt. Nausea rushed through him as he bent over to take back what was his. 

“You’re welcome,” the boy said from behind him in that language Lelouch could not understand. Lelouch pretended not to hear him. His neck hurt. His bottom lip was split. One by one he picked the oranges off the ground and transferred them back into the crumpled bag. Nunnally will be pleased, was the small unerring thought. 

“Hey,” the boy tossed a small rock at Lelouch’s back, “I’m talking to you.” 

Lelouch dropped his small bag of apricots into the bag. The milk made a thin rivulet by his shoes, very dirty-brown now. He felt impossibly warm, filled with the air of this place and chafed with its humidity and the pathetic wait. A sudden flare of irritation: this wasn’t at all necessary. He turned, harsh and unresolved, cracked open like his bottom lip.

“Do you want a thank-you?” Lelouch spat in hard English. 

The boy’s white robe seemed like a piece dislocated from the narrow and sandalwood-scented halls of shrines. His eyes were wide with something as innocent as surprise. Lelouch thought they were very green. Sickly so. 

“Why don’t you fight back?” The boy said, voice lost of its contempt for the time being. His English sounded unused, slow and clipped around the edges. He sounded curious, with an honesty that stung at Lelouch. 

His head swam and he felt strangely bloodied. “I didn’t ask for your help,” Lelouch said, eventually, which was not really an answer. The sun burned, and the boy’s face was very different from his father’s. His eyes were too mismatched against the blue of the sky and the murky heat of the ground, but he fit well somehow. At place under Japan’s sun, the basic simplicity that garnered across open temple doors and stone stairs. Fine, Lelouch thought, annoyed with it, his and the boy’s obvious discrepancies. This tenuous thing called gratitude. 

Lelouch reached a hand into the bag and bent down. Then he turned away and followed the path up without looking back. A small orange sat on the ground where his feet were.

He stopped counting. He stopped waiting, too, the sea a long endless mirage that receded back into his chest, hunched into its shell. Lelouch began to expect something else entirely, jutted out as it was from the newspapers he sometimes caught sight of at the street markets: the deadlock between the world superpowers, the Kururugi Administration using Japan’s sakuradite to maintain their policy of neutrality. A fine, capricious manipulation. Schneizel always did say it was the wait that mattered, the pause that approached peace with a notion too much like surrender. There was something familiar at work here, and it itched at him like a scab. Lelouch did not trust Genbu's lingering gaze. (The way the old man called them “guests”.) 

Lelouch didn’t trust the boy, either. He felt childish in ways that Lelouch could not be. Younger, playing in the larger part of the woods, flitting about with his stick-sword. (Kendo shinai, the boy said. Lelouch could hear the loud clashes if he dared to take the main paths; the air sputtered with it, so resonant and bracing that he occasionally forgot the sweltering absence of wind. There was a clarity to it that Lelouch liked. 

It fit him.) 

That part of Suzaku Kururugi seemed particularly ill-fated.

But he was warm, gentle with Nunnally and sweet when he thought Lelouch would not see. He snuck in too many candies and left their opened wrappers lying around far too much to be totally unattached. (A coincidence, the boy said, and so Lelouch knew otherwise. Suzaku was a very bad liar.)

The other kids taunted them still, but taunted less when he was around. Which he was, more often than not. Suzaku in his kendo wear, so obvious when he reached a stubborn hand down to yank Lelouch from the ground, the green of his eyes sharpened with concern. So bright. What was that, again? Pity or pointless benevolence?

I don’t need your help, Lelouch insisted on saying every time. I’m doing this so Nunnally doesn’t have to ask after you again, Suzaku hissed. You liar, Lelouch thought. He always took Suzaku’s hand. 

“You’re weak, but you don’t run.” His shirt was wrinkled with dirt, a bruise over a bruise on his right kneecap, but the boy did not seem to care. His eyes were on his feet. Lelouch glanced at Suzaku’s downturned head, fighting down the urge to smile a thing equal parts bitter and bland. “We can’t all scare away our problems like a brainless idiot.” 

Suzaku said nothing for a while. Lelouch already had his groceries collected and fully accounted for when he spoke again. “You’re the first,” Suzaku muttered, awkwardly soft. He scuffed his shoe on a stone. “To not run away from me, I mean.” He looked up, finally, a small tight pinch of eyebrows, a look on his child’s face that. 

What was that. 

Lelouch’s hands felt rigid, clenched on the basket’s new handles. His roughened fingers creased mute trails across his palms. His tongue wanted to fold under these words he wanted to get right. Lelouch moved his mouth into a slender smile, the thing shying painfully across his face. “Why? You’re just a boy.” 

They developed a system, after a time. Suzaku accompanied Lelouch down to the markets, to the annex, to the different Kururugi shrines. Brought them three to the beaches, the meadows and clearings, the strings of mushrooms that poked through damp moss and dirt. No one touched them. 

Lelouch had a finger for every failure, ones that stole away into his heart. Nunnally’s legs and her eyes and their dead mother. That man on the throne, vile and unconcerned and fitted with vainglory. (The Indochinese Peninsula, conquered. Renamed Area 10. The twisted red and gold raised for victory, pressing closer and closer.)

Hostages had no business moving on their own. They were leverage in the fight, levers that moved favors, and Lelouch recognized the way Suzaku’s teacher, a man who probably shouldn’t be working for someone like Genbu, looked between him and Suzaku, troubled. 

Suzaku’s father was nowhere to be seen. Unease settled in the pit of Lelouch’s stomach, shuddered in his throat and snapped at the mention of talks forging between Japan, the Chinese Federation and the E.U. Dread tightened the noose and forced incompetent hands. Greed moved men. Suzaku tried to smile beyond the bruising on his cheek when he came over, and, suddenly, with the force of a lost war, Lelouch was glad that Nunnally could not see. 

Suzaku formed a subdued child there on the floor as he said very quietly, “He hit me.” 

Another finger. Lelouch bit back his anger until blood was rust in his mouth. 

Suzaku didn’t come back to their small corner of the Kururugi estate for the longest time. 

The television brought in from the main building cranked with sounds of war fleets, Japan breaking its neutral stance, and the world crawling back into their shells in spidery anticipation. Retaliation was slid into, a huge, stilted movement that wrenched open the standstill, this festering peace. The hatchet raised, rearing from across the Pacific. The thrashing image of Britannia’s flag spilled over the screen, greased over with a shiny veneer that could be nothing less than ice, the spread of blood. 

All hail. All hail. This holy thing with a brutal, rotting hand, grasping for the whole Eastern theater. Lelouch saw it in the rain-drenched newspapers, heard it from the static alarm of radios. The streets were sparse of people, the crowing sounds of vendors picked off by drafts and forced enlistments. 

He made his way through the emptied streets. Inside, the clerk took his change and looked at him and his pears and said, "Get out of here, kid." 

It was near evening when Lelouch found Nunnally clenching her metal chair with pale red fists, a small disaster of cutlery and ceramics collapsed around her. Her hands, held so tightly that her knuckles charred white and her veins' blue pulsed through. Lelouch saw red trapped in little opening lines. 

“Where did you go?” Her voice smaller than her balled fists. 

“Down to the markets,” he replied, taking a step closer to her, picking across the shards, trying not to ache where his ankle got pulled from running. “I got your favorite. Pears.” Lelouch took one out and presented it to her; a touch to her hand, overturning her wrist so that her palm opened, pressing the fruit gently into her grip. Nunnally closed her fingers over it. Felt it, smoothing her skin across it. A slow, determined quality to her exploration. She could not hear his heart sink the way stones did in steep water: driven under without a sound. See? Some callous part of him murmured. A plate crunched under his shoe.

His sister lifted her face. On it was a distilled smile. “Thank you, big brother,” she said. “I can’t wait to eat it.” She gathered the fruit with both hands and did not bite into it, her eyes pulled shut, her legs tenderized from disuse on her chair. 

Lelouch wondered at the pitcher of grey clouds just spilling into the sky as he drew her hand away and pressed it against his face, where Nunnally could at least feel him smile. His lips twisted with it, with her fingers tracing over his cheek, the edge of his mouth. An uneven sound peeled from his mouth, brokenly, like a sob. 

Lelouch left his shoes behind. Feet bared as he tumbled down, running to the sea, sand and unwashed gravel pinching at his toes. Split skin and gulps pushed back into his throat and defiance singing high on his shoulders. The skies rumbled with unspent clouds, thick with the oncoming storm, bleak and raw. The distance hummed with unwon wars. 

Will you do it again? he spat, stolen into the ocean gust. His mouth pulled apart until his teeth could not stand being slicked with silence. Abandon us, Lelouch dared. He could not breathe, the sea and the salt on the wind, spinning rapids and concrete-cold filling in him. Seawater and not-yet rain flecked his skin. He was bruising with the forces that had begun to move. 

The few lights in the annex blew out with the first claps of thunder. Inside, Nunnally jerked, and Lelouch rasped a hand over her temple, humming, willing her back to sleep. He saw nothing but black before the windows flashed a sudden white. The world lit up in a glance of light, and Lelouch turned his eyes to catch the shadows. The shape emerged briefly, in pieces at a time, from the darkness; angles, elbows and fingers that hugged bent knees. 

Lelouch rolled off the futon and rose, barefoot. His fingers scratched at the latch before they caught, and the door creaked open. Lelouch held open the door as he peered out, pushing his face into the moist cool air. The narrow eave barely prevented rain from soaking him through, the wind already peeling water onto his skin. 

Suzaku was almost curled on the dark ground, crushed into a fetal position. What happened, Lelouch wanted to ask. What more could they have done to us? “Suzaku,” he called. Rain flecked him, the chill settling into him new and strange. It was not like the summer at all. “You’ll get sick.” When it became clear the boy would not respond, Lelouch took a step into the rain, out from under the eave, dirt creasing into the cuts on his feet. His shoulder grew immediately wet, then the rest of him followed.

“It’s okay,” he said, uselessly. The skies spat, clapped. Rain came down on them in a slow steeping of skin. Lelouch reached a hand through the rain and took hold of Suzaku’s elbow. He didn’t know how long he’s been here like this, freezing and lifeless. Something old, almost as old as them, came over him. Failure should not be so discreet, so gaping. Lelouch clenched his teeth and shook Suzaku, tremoring.

“Come on,” he hissed, and thought about how small they were, about how they were just children. He shivered violently, but his hold remained resolute. “Get up.” 

Suzaku lifted his head from his knees. Thunder streamed somewhere far above; light, suddenly, loudly. On Suzaku’s face was something wild and hopeless. His hands spasmed in loose fists, fingers dirtied, rusted brown and red. Rain dribbled down his chin, flattened his hair to his cheeks, split over his knuckles. "I did it."

Lelouch wondered if somebody was dead. He was just a boy, Lelouch thought, desperately.

“I didn't," Suzaku's voice sounded carved out of a stone, thrown into ricochet. It sounded sick, like green in a jar. It made Lelouch hurt somewhere he wished was extinct. "I," Suzaku gagged. His entire body shook, tearing into Lelouch's. Around them, the storm churned and fell and sprayed, crackling like waves. Another slash of thunder; their skin was bleached, clothes soaked through to the bone, and he saw briefly the blood that hadn't washed away. He dug his fingers into Suzaku's elbow; Suzaku barely twitched.

Lelouch didn't know if he could hear him through the roar of rain: "Suzaku. You came here for a reason." Lelouch caught his hands, the ones that hung limp, and their fingers tangled, shook as Suzaku sobbed, and he said, "You're safe here."


End file.
